Okra Even Inspires Poetry

Okra is such a delectable vegetable, it has even inspired poetry and song. Chris Smithers' "I Got No Love" is sung by a peddler of vegetables who has "Okra, enough to choke ya, and beans of every kind." (Sound familiar?) And the Florida Okra Fest (slogan, "Celebrate the Pod) features "The Okra Song," which begins:


Okra it gets slimy
When you cut it with a knife
Love is just as slippery
You gotta hang on for dear life

I even came across a poem that mentions okra by a well-known Cincinnati poet, Nikki Giovanni. (She was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but grew up in Lincoln Heights.)

Knoxville Tennessee

I always like summer
Best
you can eat fresh corn
From daddy's garden
And okra
And greens
And cabbage
And lots of
Barbeque
And buttermilk
And homemade ice-cream
At the church picnic
And listen to
Gospel music
Outside
At the church
Homecoming
And go to the mountains with
Your grandmother
And go barefooted
And be warm
All the time
Not only when you go to bed
And sleep

--Nikki Giovanni

Tomatoes Deserve an Ode

Eleven pounds of tomatoes in a large share on Saturday—that must be some kind of record. I've made gazpacho, BLTs, and ketchup! (more on that soon). There will be more recipes as we work our way through the immense red and yellow bounty, but today’s blog posting is simply a poem by Pablo Neruda, an ode to tomatoes, and just one thing to mention about it—remember, in South America, December is the equivalent of July here, when the tomatoes start rolling in by the bushel.

Ode To Tomatoes
Pablo Neruda

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it’s time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.

Poet Farmers

I was thinking about poems about farming, and decided that there are probably more poet farmers than, say, science-fiction writing farmers (does Stephen King dare to raise corn, do you suppose?) Wendell Berry comes first to my mind; Suellyn Shupe posted a poem by Berry on the blog earlier this season. I like “The Man Born to Farming” especially. Here’s an excerpt:

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

Walt Whitman wrote a wonderful short poem called “A Farm-Picture”:

Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding;
And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away.

Then there was Carl Sandburg, a fellow who knew something about the Midwest with its fields of grain and pastures of cattle. He apparently caught the corn laughing at him once, and that inspired him to write “The Laughing Corn,” of which this is an excerpt:

There was a high majestic fooling
Day before yesterday in the yellow corn.
And day after to-morrow in the yellow corn
There will be high majestic fooling.
The ears ripen in late summer
And come on with a conquering laughter,
Come on with a high and conquering laughter.

But enough about corn! One of my favorite poets, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, wrote an ode to tomatoes that I really like; I think I’ll post the entire poem as a separate blog entry (done--here's the link). Other poets who were farmers . . . Robert Burns (he wrote a poem about turning up a mouse nest with his plow), Henry David Thoreau (his poem “I Am the Autumnal Sun” has some nice harvest images in it), and Robert Frost.

It has been said about Robert Frost that it is hard to tell which was his vocation and which his avocation—he was dedicated to both farming and poetry. The illustration at the top of this blog entry is a woodcut by J. J. Lanke of Frost's farm in Derry, New Hampshire. But even he occasionally was a bit overwhelmed by the harvest; I like his poem, “After Apple-Picking,” when he realizes just how many apples he has. It reminds me a bit of the yield of the pear tree in the Schenks’ yard:

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

Do you have a favorite farming poem, or a favorite poet farmer? Let us know!